Scottish companies Nallatech and Alpha Data have revealed "Maxwell", an FGPA-based supercomputer that is 10 times more energy efficient and up to 300 times faster than traditional equivalents. By reprogramming the FPGA chips at runtime, the machine is able to perform some calculations much more efficiently than a traditional computer, in a way somewhat reminiscent of the ill-fated Omega from MicroDigital. The design also requires less space and cooling than traditional supercomputers. Although the technology behind the machine is sound, there are still some implementation issues to resolve, such as determining the best way of programming the FPGAs for a given problem.

It's reported that other companies are also looking at using FPGAs in large numbers to produce similar supercomputers.

I imagine the FPGAs are actually just tunable to doing something else, rather than you being able to change them at will constantly - the problem of converting a language into something you can feed into an FPGA to describe how it functions is enormously complex, and for everything but the most simple designs can take ages (sometimes literally) to just work out how to get the design to fit, let alone efficiently.

Also, with numbers quoted like this, I'm reminded of the PS3: yeah, sure, it'll be 300 times faster than anything else in the world - you just won't be able to find a purpose for the single case that it is